Unfinished Business                                                                         11/10/46

 

Scripture: Luke 14: 27-35

 

Text: Luke 14: 28-30;  “For which of you, desiring to build a tower, doth not first sit down and count the cost, whether he have wherewith to complete it?  Lest haply, when he hath laid a foundation, and is not able to finish, all that behold him begin to mock him, saying, This man began to build, and was not able to finish.”

 

Perhaps these words might be summarized in the last three words, asked as a question: .... “able to finish?”

 

There is a wealth of suggestion in this parable of the Tower Builder, as there is in all of the 29 or so parables of Jesus.  We read of it and think immediately of building projects we have seen --- perhaps of a building in our own city which was begun and used as a religious meeting house.  But it never got farther in construction than the substantial basement floor with temporary roof.  At length it was given up from its original purpose, and sold to the American Legion to become the Legion’s home, and to have its superstructure later completed for the new purpose.

 

An uncompleted structure has stood for years in the city of Detroit [Shelby and 1st Street] which reminds one of the parable of the Rash Builder.  In the days of prosperity following the first World War a group of excellent citizens organized to form a great Club (Ponchartrain Club) with life memberships at $1,000.  About 2,500 men subscribed, in varying amounts to the idea of having a marvelous building grace a splendid corner.  The building was to be so well designed and constructed that it would influence the architectural and social life of the whole neighborhood.  And the cost was estimated in this case, it being expected that some 4 million dollars would be spent on it.

 

Excavation and construction were begun, and on July 17, 1929, the cornerstone of the great new clubhouse was laid.  A magnificent structure was begun, but its builders were never able to finish it.  Through the years of the two decades following the laying of that cornerstone, it has stood -- unfinished, the skeleton of a big idea, serving, among other uses, as a convenient parking place. For there began, later in that same year, the great economic depression which brought so many things to a halt and slowed other streams to a trickle.  And that building has remained, to this -- unfinished business.

 

Jesus knew the “agenda of living” well.  He knew that many clubs, and individuals, and organized efforts, live out their lives under the item of unfinished business.

 

By this parable, he suggests that the way of life is expensive.  Two of his own close disciples once asked a question characteristic of most of us in our less-than-Christian moments.

 

“Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask.”  It sounded as harmless as, “Will you do me a favor?” before saying what the favor being requested is to be!  Not, “Teacher, we will do for you whatever you ask of us.”

 

On that occasion, Jesus asked, “Are you able to drink the cup that I drink?”  They said, “Yes, we are able.”  And he then said something like this: all right, but I offer danger, and service, not privileged position.

 

The willingness to start something is a great, and often good, characteristic of people in our land.  It is well to link it with a careful counting of cost, all kinds of cost, lest the day come when neighbors may say, “He meant well, but he couldn’t hold out,”  or  “He didn’t foresee this result.”

 

A great deal more of living comes under the heading of “unfinished business” than meets the eye. 

 

The young ladies who attend this service today, as a guest group, doubtless made some sort of application for membership in “Job’s Daughters.”  Probably each applicant was a bit uneasy, and just a bit uncertain until the time came when she knew she was to be accepted as a member.  Then came the time when she was accepted and received into its mysteries and its sisterhood.  She had arrived!

 

But that was not the ultimate not the end.  It was just a beginning!  She found that there were things to learn, disciplines to lay upon herself that were to influence the way she lives and grows.  Her membership comes under the heading of unfinished, continuing, business.

 

It is so with marriage.  I have recently pronounced a promising young man and a fine young woman husband and wife, after they exchanged their solemn, sincere vows of marriage in the presence of witnesses before me.  They are now married, and I hope they will “live happily ever after” as the story book concludes.  But a wedding is not a conclusion of anything except preparation.  It is a beginning.  Those two young people, and all bridal couples like them, will be happy through the coming years only in proportion to their ability to work and play and love and sorrow and laugh together through their years.  A successful marriage, may I remind every one of us, and perhaps especially us who have been married for some time, is continual unfinished business.  Successful and happy couples are forever busy at their home building.  (Don’t confuse “home” with “house.”)

 

Tomorrow, our community will join the nation in celebrating the annual passing of another Armistice Day.  28 years ago, the whistles blew wildly, bells rang, people shouted and laughed at the end of a terrible war.  Whether you heard those whistles or not, you know what it was like, for we all have seen a similar occasion nearly 27 years later!  People shouted their relief that war was over and acted, then and thereafter, as though it was over, and that peace had arrived.  The bitter truth is that peace had not, and has not now, arrived.  That was only an armistice - a cessation of the shooting hostilities.  The peace was never successfully made and kept -- and peace is now yet to be made!

 

The recent war is still unfinished business -- it hasn’t even been officially declared at an end, nor does any person know when it will be declared at an end.  The peace is even more unfinished business.  In fact it has hardly begun, a year and a quarter after the military surrender of the last Axis Power to hold out.

 

The only possible spiritual base of world peace (and there is no permanent base other than spiritual) is a sense of world brotherhood.  Both peace and world brotherhood come under the heading of unfinished, hardly-begun, business.  A tremendous cost has brought us to this opportunity for peace.  Someone has figured out that in the days of the Caesars, a couple of thousand years ago, it cost about 75 cents to kill a man in battle.  By Napoleon’s day, the cost had risen to $3,000.  At the time of our American war between the states, it cost $5,000.  In World War I the cash price was $21,000, and in World War II the cost was $50,000 for killing each single enemy.  That is the amount of toil and effort, of planning and materials, represented in money, that has gone in War.  And that says nothing of the damage to peoples’ souls, the cost of survival, the blasting of life.  More than 4 millions of God’s human creatures were killed, and millions more were maimed, or left homeless to die.

 

[editor’s note: the number of 4 millions must be in hostilities themselves, and not include the millions starved in the siege of Leningrad, or the estimated 6 million killed in the Holocaust.]

 

Webster says that an “Armistice” is “a brief suspension of hostilities by agreement.”  That is what, essentially, we have now!

 

The shocks and hatreds incident to the killing of millions; the reproach and despair and desperation of millions dislocated and left without adequate means of livelihood; the burden of hundreds of billions of dollars in war indebtedness to be saddled on the earning power of our grandchildren, as well as on us present survivors; the definite certainty that a renewal of large scale warfare would wipe out untold populations, absolutely wreck all modern means of livelihood and plunge any survivors on the earth back to a primitive existence; these all combine to pile to massive and terrifying heights the problems of peace.  The world ought to be appalled; the world ought to be healthily scared; the world ought -- all of it -- to work like mad to find and build permanent peace.  Peace cannot come from “deals” over the spoils of battle.  It can only come in spiritual principles, sought, found, and lived by all people.

 

Some Christian young people have crystallized the problem and suggested the solution in a slogan of theirs that goes like this: “We must be the world we want.”  That is a bare beginning, but it is an important and sound point from which to begin on the great unfinished business of Peace.

 

Our church, all churches, the universal church, comes under the heading “unfinished business.”

 

After centuries of persecution (not all of which is past everywhere) it has achieved, in much of the world, respectability.  Perhaps this contributes to its weakness rather than to strength.  For some strange, perverse reason, the persecuted church has showed more spiritual strength in history than has the comfortable church.

 

When we think in terms of respectability, we lose sight of the church’s durability!  We exalt the name of Jesus, and take it upon us, but his spirit is not found in us.  We sing “In Christ there is no East or West”  --  but there is!  We preach “All men are brothers” -- but we don’t act like it!

 

Now I do not suggest for a moment that we quit singing that splendid hymn until after Utopia arrives!  And I would increase the preaching that men are brothers.  I plead that we give ourselves, even at great cost, to the practice of those principles in our souls.  The world will be won not by a denial of our ideals but by painful, humble, struggling, costly toil toward them!  Never mind who may be called a hypocrite and who not.  Let’s all be about the business.  Time is running out and is desperately short.  It is far later than we think!

 

The true church is not - and never has been - a group of self-respecting saints.  It is a group of self-confessed sinners!  It is God’ faithful remnant struggling to bring, and support, His kingdom.

 

C. T. Studd used to repeat an illuminating bit of verse:

 

            Some wish to live within the sound

                        of church or chapel bell,

            I want to run a rescue shop

                        Within a yard of hell!

 

Salvation!  Spiritual salvage -- unfinished business.  Our lives are incomplete.  Mankind - people, are unfinished.  How we think about ourselves is terribly important.

 

Here are three sentences that one man gathered out of one week’s reading.  “Man is a low form of cellular life on his way to the manure heap.”  Obviously that is not a statement of humility.  It is a statement of cynicism, of irresponsibility, of despair, of degradation.  Another -- “Man is fighting a lone fight against a vast indifference.”  Not exactly degraded, this statement has a hint of bravery, but it is still hopeless.  Now set over against those two sentences a third:  “Brethren, now are we sons of God!”  Think of that!  Not stepping stones; not spiritual nomads, not robots, nor tools; not either masters nor slaves --

 

[it appears the last page has been lost.]

 

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delivered in Wisconsin Rapids, November 10, 1946